Why I Voted for the OCD-Witness and You Should Consider Doing Too

I write a lot on these pages about how the Steem ecosystem isn’t one site but building a new Internet. With that, and obviously also with money, comes the same old problem which has occupied the Internet ever since its creation: discovery.

Everyone joining Steem suffers with the same problem: ”I wrote awesome content and nobody reads it, and I’m not earning”.

Don’t feel bad, don’t think you’re the only one. It’s been the bane of the Internet, of life even and things won’t change. If anything, it will only get worse as more people discover and join Steem and always more content is submitted to the Steem blockchain.

The Internet, and Steem(it), has always been a floodgate for content, an open floodgate. Millions of people have tried their hand at problogging and almost as many have given up after some months, or years, because they didn’t find an audience and thus didn’t make any money.

The honeypot at the foot of the rainbow wasn’t found, most even never saw the rainbow. And Steem won’t be different to that.

Curation Projects

Luckily on the Steem blockchain the problem is known and there are many curation projects in operation. Some projects are closed, others semi-closed and others are open.

One of the biggest benevolent curation projects, together with the @curie project, is @ocd.

OCD is a curation project started by @acidyo and has been curating daily for around half a year now. The OCD project strives to find underrewarded content, most specifically content written by Steemians who haven’t been that long on Steem yet.

Think of it as a volunteer project which welcomes new Steemians and highlights their excellence.

But OCD does more than just highlight the content. Each post curated by @ocd is also upvoted by @acidyo, who currently holds around 500k SP. Additionally, acidyo benefits a sizeable curation trail (other upvotes which come after he upvotes a post) and he has also often promoted frontrunning his own OCD upvote.

The OCD project consists currently of more than 30 curators, all volunteers who spend hours weekly hunting the Steem community for great content created by lesser known Steemians. While the curators receive a reward, and those who write a curation post a share of the rewards on the curation post they’ve written, as often with volunteering the rewards are only small for the time spent. Most of the rewards earned by the OCD project are used to power up the account and thus distribute more rewards within the Steem community.

Until now acidyo has used his own Steem Power to upvote the content the OCD curators found. He even leases SP to keep the project growing and the rewards high. A benevolent service by him. Not every whale in the Steem community is as altruistic.

Recently, @acidyo announced that the project has launched its own Steem witness.

Witnesses are important within the structure of the Steem ecosystem, because steem’s Governance is based on the known, and battle-tested, DPOS principle (Delegated Proof of Stake). The easiest way to explain Steem’s DPOS is a democratic institution in which your vote has the impact of the amount of Steem Power your account holds (vests). The witnesses are our candidates which can be voted in the Governance structure.

From the Steemit FAQ:

What are Steem witnesses?
The Steem blockchain requires a set of people to create blocks and uses a consensus mechanism called delegated proof of stake, or DPOS. The community elects 'witnesses' to act as the network's block producers and governance body. There are 20 full-time witnesses, producing a block every 63-second round. A 21st position is shared by backup witnesses, who are scheduled proportionally to the amount of stake-weighted community approval they have. Witnesses are compensated with STEEM Power for each block they create.

As one can see there are two elements to being a witness: governance (politics) and rewards. The more combined vests (SP) has been received by witnesses in the form of votes, the higher they climb in the witness rankings.

Witnesses with higher positions get more opportunities to create new blocks. The top 20 witnesses create a new block every 63 seconds, 24/7. They are also the ones voting everything that happens with the Steem blockchain.

Witnesses could tomorrow decide to change the rewards structure. Witnesses are responsible for the Steem price feeds. Witnesses decide over the minimum cost for account creation and publish those. In short: witnesses are important, they decide over the health, longevity and thus also failure of the system.

Therefore it matters that we vote for great witnesses. So far the Steem blockchain has been lucky and when looking at the Top 100 witnesses, we mostly have great witnesses, all focused on making the Steem blockchain a success. But that isn’t guaranteed to stay that way. The Steem blockchain also has witnesses who are focused solely on short-term profits and on maximising those profits. They couldn’t care less about the health and longevity of the platform, as long as they make their bucks.

Aside from the awesome project that is @ocd, the project’s founder and leader, @acidyo, is also somebody who cares about the health of the Steem blockchain, and the rewards pool. Acidyo does understand that it is important to spread wealth, to grow the middle class, and to empower. Empower both new and older Steemians, and work at retention as well. You don’t have to take my word for it though, just hop over to acidyo’s feed and check out some posts.

Let me curate some for you:

• Acidyo sponsors 100 accounts for the 2017 holidays
• Acidyo publicly shares his struggles how to work with bots
• Acidyo shares his thoughts about flags, all while also sharing a lot of work he does/has done

Anybody who has spent some time in chat with acidyo has more than likely also heard how important the health and longevity of the platform are to him. There is no doubt that he constantly shares his justified thoughts, and position, with the team of OCD curators too.

TL;DR: Why the @ocd-witness Deserves Your Witness Vote

Steem, just like the Internet, has a problem with discovery of great content. @ocd is one of the most active projects highlighting and rewarding great content from lesser known Steemians. At the time of writing the OCD project has published 227 daily curation posts (156 English, 71 International content), rewarding more than thousand Steemians.

Led by @acidyo, the project is in safe hands and so is your vote. Acidyo is a responsible Steem whale and cares about the long term success of planet Steem, and all its inhabitants.

All revenue generated from operation the witness will be used to further grow the @ocd project and also to increase the rewards for the curators, who spend many hours every week trying to find great content.

I voted for the @ocd-witness, and so should you. Remember those days of low rewards and days of desperation your content wasn’t found? OCD, Operation Curation Delegation, is one of the projects trying to improve that situation and they deserve you support.

You can vote here for the OCD witness: https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Scroll down to the box below the Top 50 ranking and enter @ocd-witness, then hit VOTE, or tap it or hit the [enter] key on your keyboard. Next you will need to sign in with your main account’s active password.

Thanks for taking the time to come this far and I hope that you will consider voting for the @ocd-witness, just like I did.